When did WWII (or WWI, WWIII, WWIV etc according to your viewpoint) actually start? 1939 is a very Euro-centric view. Surely 1937 has a strong claim (Sino-Japanese War). But what about 1931? There was no 'peace' in China from then on, and a foreign power was involved.

And again, when did it end? With the surrender of Japan, or the final expulsion of the US backed Kuomintang from mainland China in 1949?

And after that it was less than a year before there were international forces fighting in Korea, in a war that has yet to formally end . . .

Dave:

Thanks, I did realise that your post was more of a critique of Steinberg's than anything else, sorry if I didn't make that sufficiently clear. But to the extent to which labels matter I don't see the value in calling these world wars, because they are not by any stretch of the imagination world wars. As Ross says, we can argue this even for WWI, but it's surely far less misleading there than for 1904-5 or 1877-8. In the end I'm even sure whether I'm just being pedantic here, but if we are going to stick labels onto things then we've already got one which seems to fit most of Steinberg's criteria, and that's the total war concept.

Erik:

Rapid-fire artillery still comes back to the Franco-German antagonism doesn't it? France was already making large numbers of 75s by 1904.

BTW, I've just noticed that Wikipedia has a section for Groundbreak French weapons of the 19th century, including 4 aircraft which, however groundbreaking they were, cannot reasonably be considered weapons ...

However, we could go the other way and suggest that the First World War was a European War with a colonial slant and the actually the only World War was the Second World War, which was truely global in its scale and scope i.e. there were significant battles on several continents. The truth is that the First World War was decided in Europe, however, the Second World War was not decided when the war ended in Europe.

This idea is a a bit like a new version of the Total War debate and will probably rage for a while. The Total War arguement has come in for criticism, notably by Jeremy Black who has suggested what may be total for one nation is not for another. Indeed the concept was applied the First and Second World Wars but the model has been used on the Thirty Years War. Hence the problem with these models. Interresting and helpful in exploring conflicts and their nature but they end up being used in areas that are just not applicable.

My two pennys worth.

Now I do not find Steinberg's argument entirely convincing, and my post was an attempt to explain why. Leaving aside the question of scope, and employing only the criteria that Steinberg uses to see the Russo-Japanese War as like World War I, I find that earlier conflicts qualify just as much as his World War Zero. While my post focused on the Russo-Turkish War, I think very similar arguments could be made for the Crimean War and the American Civil War.

In sum, I was accepting for the sake of argument that we can leave out scope / scale, and suggesting if we do so, there are lots of wars we might choose to label World War Zero.